Who to instruct: surveyor, valuer or contractor

The building surveyor

Prepares or responds to the schedule, item by item, and prices the works. This is the document the negotiation is conducted through, and it is the first instruction on either side.

For a tenant, the response is where items are struck out as not being breaches, as improvement rather than repair, or as covered by a licence to alter.

The valuer

Answers the section 18 question: what the disrepair does to the value of the landlord's reversion, which caps the damages whatever the works cost.

It is a separate skill and frequently a separate person. For a tenant facing a large claim on a building the landlord intends to alter anyway, it is the instruction that changes the outcome.

The contractor

Prices and carries out actual works. A contractor's quote is useful evidence of what the works cost and it is not a schedule response, because a contractor is not assessing whether an item is a breach.

Tenants sometimes commission a contractor's price first because it is cheap and fast. It answers the smallest of the three questions.

The order that saves money

For a tenant: read the lease and the licences first, then a surveyor's response to the schedule, then a diminution valuation if the claim is large or the landlord's plans suggest the cap bites.

For a landlord: the schedule, then the works pricing, then the section 18 position before quantifying, because a claim quantified above the cap invites exactly the response that unravels it.

Doing the works instead

A tenant with time before expiry frequently does better carrying out the works than paying a claim, because the tenant controls the specification and the contractor.

That option closes at lease end, which is why the most valuable conversation about dilapidations happens a year before expiry rather than after a schedule arrives.